The Thukrals wanted their son, Dhruv, to go into nanotechnology. So when he told them he’d rather be a video game developer he might as well have said he wanted to join the circus.
“Are you serious?” they asked.
He was. The 21-year-old USC graduate student proved it by switching the focus of his computer science doctorate from a field known as distributed systems to video game programming.
He then launched a campaign to convince his parents back home in New Delhi that helping people have fun was not only a legitimate career but also lucrative. He peppered them with articles about the growth of the video game industry, which is expected to generate global revenue of nearly $50 billion this year. He also sent them stock charts and annual reports of some of the industry’s top companies.
They relented. Read more.